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Credit card debt collection

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Re: Credit card debt collection

#521

Post by nbadg »

pjmlp wrote: post #510
nbadg wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that doesn't answer my question. What I'm saying is, the Ämter in Berlin are explicitly using the term "Kreditkarte" to refer to all Visa/Mastercard/Maestro cards, including debit cards. In Berlin, only the locations that say they accept Kreditkarten, will accept debit cards that are backed by Visa/Mastercard/Maestro payment infrastructure. If they only say they accept Girokarte, then they will not accept d…

Girokarte is a synonym for Debitkarte, just like in France or Swiss Romade one would say carte bleue instead of carte debit, in Portugal Multibanco instead of cartão de débito,... As for the rest, I guest we are wasting each other's time discussing this any furher.

> Girokarte is a synonym for Debitkarte

I'm not sure how to handle this because it's both incorrect in technical language (Girocards are exclusive to a particular payment infrastructure that only exists in Germany, unless partnered with a separate payment infrastructure, but the co-branded payment infrastructure is only used outside of Germany [1]) as well as incorrect with respect to my experience with everyday language, including all of the links I've provided including from official government sources.

But I agree on one thing: it's a waste of time to keep talking about this.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard

Re: Credit card debt collection

#522

Post by Broken_Hippo »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #435
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't about owing money or even debt. You can be in a lot of debt and have good credit. You can also have very little debt and have very poor credit because you couldn't pay a hospital bill or didn't get the final electric bill from your old apartment paid before it went to collections. It is really about keeping poor people out. You might be able to argue something about responsibility if you can prove that they…

Disagree. There's no intent to keep poor people out. Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit. Creditors these days tend to treat medical debt separately--someone who has only medical debt probably is someone who is responsible but something happened to them. Likewise, back in the era of the housing collapse and strategic default creditors would look at someone who had a forec…

Someone who has little but doesn't spend too much will generally have good credit.

No. Living within your means makes you wind up with no credit.

Utilities and landlords rarely report your on-time payments, after all. You have no history, and you need to prove yourself instead of the lenders assuming you are responsible.

And I'll mention here that different places hound folks with a recent bankruptcy, despite a variety of debt issues that led to bankruptcy.

And you can't even measure responsibility from whether or not it is medical debt. I struggled in my early to mid 20's because my then spouse wound up with a major mental health issue. He wound up on disability, and before (and sometimes after) would take money from our account or out of my purse. I know in hindsight that I should have taken different actions, but I didn't think about it in the midst of constant stress.

And at least I was finally able to leave, some years too late, but that shouldn't be required. I left due to unhappiness, not because of the illness. It would be worse if it were a child's sickness that caused the struggle - the bills might be in the spouse's name instead of yours. None of that would show up on a credit report.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#523

Post by qwytw »

eru wrote: post #512
qwytw wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, if you just hand money to individuals, it's very hard to remove that money from the economy later I'm not really arguing that that would be a better option (outside of exceptional circumstances) though. > What makes you think so? Because lower income households generally have low saving rates. > Btw, 'money' doesn't really get invested, at least not on the level of the whole economy. If someone invests money…

Bubbles don't really exist as a meaningful empiric concept. Especially not when you have a robust short selling system so that speculators can pop 'bubbles'.

Ok, higher inflation in certain sectors. e.g. "free" money resulted in housing prices growing at a much faster pace than goods and services for an extended period of time (something similar also applies to education in the US for instance)

> short selling system so that speculators can pop 'bubbles'.

Like in real estate? I mean technically, yeah it's not even really bubble in most places (obviously not China for instance). But I'm pretty sure you understand what I'm trying to say (or should, anyway)

Re: Credit card debt collection

#525

Post by DanBC »

argonaut wrote: post #133
adev_ wrote: post #91

It might be a very European view to the problem but: Why does the American government does even tolerate this credit card garbage business in the first place ? We are in the 21th century. Most payment can be validated electronically and processed under 200ms. I can pay something with my phone and get money taken directly from my bank account within seconds. There is absolutely no need of Credit Cards where Debit Card…

Credit card debt driving families to suicide is super exaggerated. America makes it relatively easy to get rid of credit card debt through bankruptcy. And even after bankruptcy it's possible to get credit cards again after a few years. And after seven years it's completely off your credit report.

That's a misunderstanding of the antecedents to death by suicide. We know (from the NCISH work in the UK) that financial distress is a significant factor for many people who die by suicide.

People who attempt suicide may be less able to see the situation with calm rationality.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#526

Post by DanBC »

denton-scratch wrote: post #371
eru wrote: post #36

> I will bet you that, in practice, they simply avoid collecting against anyone who demonstrates ability and financial resources to enforce their rights. This is one for the history books of borked equilibriums. We devoted substantial efforts to pro-consumer legislation to address abuse of (mostly) poor people. We gated redress behind labor that is abundantly available in the professional managerial class and scarce…

> (like eg the British NHS does, modulo the option to go to a private hospital for enough money) IME it's more complicated than that. Firstly, the NHS allows consultants to do private work, making use of NHS resources, including beds, radiography and theatres. Secondly, a consultant can refer you back to the NHS for treatment, effectively "jumping the queue". I would never rely on a private hospital. They never have…

> Secondly, a consultant can refer you back to the NHS for treatment, effectively "jumping the queue".

The patient would go to the back of the NHS queue, so I'm not sure how they're jumping anything.

The real problem is that private healthcare over-treats people with unnecessary surgery, and cherrypicks the easy stuff, but dumps patients back into NHS care as soon as they get complex.

https://x.com/ShaunLintern/status/1700778868666216542?s=20

Re: Credit card debt collection

#527

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

kelnos wrote: post #460
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they being penalized? Nothing was owed to them, so withholding something not theirs isn't a penalty. Why should the company assume higher risk merely to protect people it has no obligation to?

The point is that a credit report is probably a poor signal of risk when it comes to the kinds of things most employers care about when considering hiring someone. If you have evidence to support the idea that a credit report actually is a good signal here, then by all means, present it. If not, then the default assumption should be that it's not useful, or at the very least not equitable. We shouldn't be adding qual…

> If not, then the default assumption should be that it's not useful, or at the very least not equitable. We shouldn't be adding qualifications to things based on guesswork.

In a free country, that's for them to decide. I don't think it should be a default assumption. Neither does the government, where excessive debt tends to signal a willingness to commit treason for those who try to get security clearances.

If someone would try to sell documents to the Russians because they carry a x5 debt load of what they should for their income, is it really so ridiculous a concern that they might skim the till for the same reason?

> And in general, we very often legally require companies assume higher risk in various things

Sure, when it's morally the right thing to do, or when it would create perverse incentives if they didn't.

Here? They just won't hire anyone. Self-pay at the pumps, no convenience store at all, or some horrendous gigantic vending machine deal, no employees. That doesn't serve the community, customers, and Mr.-I-Think-Credit-Cards-Mean-Free-Money gets no job.

> The thing that generally pisses me off about attitudes like yours is that it advocates for a system where when you do one thing wrong,

It wasn't "did one thing wrong". It's always "did one thing wrong, then like a misbehaving child decided to do five other things wrong out of spite or for shits and giggles or whatever."

And that behavior's just dangerous to fucking society as a whole.

> I've found that the people with these attitudes are usually those who have either a) never experienced much in the way of hardship, o

Then I'm your counter-example. Grew up on food stamps. Remember living out of a car when I was a kid. Free school lunches. Not just for a little while, first through highschool.

> and now have a chip on their shoulder that makes them advocate for continuing to make it hard for everyone else.

The universe makes it hard on them, and everyone else. Stop expecting others to try to make it easy on screwups.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#528

Post by denton-scratch »

DanBC wrote: post #526
denton-scratch wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (like eg the British NHS does, modulo the option to go to a private hospital for enough money) IME it's more complicated than that. Firstly, the NHS allows consultants to do private work, making use of NHS resources, including beds, radiography and theatres. Secondly, a consultant can refer you back to the NHS for treatment, effectively "jumping the queue". I would never rely on a private hospital. They never have…

> Secondly, a consultant can refer you back to the NHS for treatment, effectively "jumping the queue". The patient would go to the back of the NHS queue, so I'm not sure how they're jumping anything. The real problem is that private healthcare over-treats people with unnecessary surgery, and cherrypicks the easy stuff, but dumps patients back into NHS care as soon as they get complex. https://x.com/ShaunLintern/statu…

> The patient would go to the back of the NHS queue

This is not true.

I went to the NHS over my kid's glue-ear. We had to see a consultant, but the earliest appointment was 9 months, and the hearing problem was impeding our child's language acquisition. So we went private, and had an appointment with the consultant in a few weeks. The consultant recommended surgery to install grommets (wow!), and a few weeks later we attended for NHS surgery, to be performed by the same consultant.

This was 30 years ago; but I've been told recently (a couple of days ago) that this still goes on.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#529

Post by pierat »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #496
pierat wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that actually matter? I'm here, and it costs $3500 plus all my student debt to legally leave.

Yes, otherwise it sounds like you're changing the subject. No, it costs whatever the visas and transportation costs. I've never heard of anyone not being allowed to leave a country because of student debt.

No, getting rid of my citizenship costs $3500 plus all my student debt.

Ive been told countless times "if you dont like it here, leave". And I cant.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#530

Post by incahoots »

rcxdude wrote: post #238
Reason077 wrote: post #177

One thing that's not mentioned in this article is that credit card companies will sometimes make last-ditch "clear your debt at a discount" offers before passing your debt on to a collection agency. This happened to me many years ago. In the wake of the '08 financial crisis, I'd lost my job abruptly and decided to go travelling. I'd accumulated a balance that was fairly substantial for me at the time (on the order of…

This is because debt collection is a terrible deal: debt like this sells for a very steep discount, because debt collectors generally have a low rate of success of collecting. They essentially rely on apathy, ignorance, or compliance from the debtor, and if there's any resistance put up they essentially just write it off as it's no longer worth the effort (especially because debt collectors often don't have any actua…

Fwiw, a friend works at a collection agency (that’s an entire different story), and it’s exactly as you say. Extremely rare that a company that sells their debt to the collection company will provide them any additional information regarding the debt.

My friend has told me that on occasion the debt collection company will reach out to the original owners of the debt and request additional information, but seldom get a response.

Anyone reading this, it is absolutely in your best interest to fight any debt, no matter if you believe you owe it or not. Nothing changes if you fight it and they have sufficient proof. Best case scenario is they wipe it from your credit report.

If you’ve already began making payments then you’re SOL, as making payments is considered ownership of the debt in question.

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